FWIW some years ago Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) wrote Lamernews [0][1] with the goal to create such a clone. AFAIK Lamernews, as a site, is long gone, but the code -Ruby, Sinatra, Redis- is still there.
There have also been some forks. EchoJS [2] made a few modifications through the years and is running still today. Mostly about moderation and some related tasks like blacklisting and others. Can't say much about pros/cons but at least it's still used and somewhat maintained.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3146051
[1] https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
[2] https://github.com/echojs/echojs
In Ask HN: Is there an open-source HN forum clone?antirez
lamernews
Ruby2011–2023
antirez / lamernews
lamernews
Lamer News -- an HN style social news site written in Ruby/Sinatra/Redis/JQuery
24Distinct people
24Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Lamer News -- an HN style social news site written in Ruby/Sinatra/Redis/JQuery
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year24 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-10-20 20:04:43 UTC to 2023-04-24 20:15:13 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 1 | 10 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
About
Lamer news is an implementation of a Reddit / Hacker News style news web site
written using Ruby, Sinatra, Redis and jQuery.
The goal is to have a system that is very simple to understand and modify and
that is able to handle a very high load using a small virtual server, ensuring
at the same time a very low latency user experience.
This project was created in order to run http://lamernews.com but is free for
everybody to use, fork, and have fun with.
We believe it is also a good programming example for Redis as a sole DB of a
nontrivial, real world, web application.
Installation
Lamer news is a Ruby/Sinatra/Redis/jQuery application.
You need to install Redis and Ruby 1.9.2+ with the following gems:
redis 3.0 or greater
hiredis
sinatra
json
ruby-hmac
net/smtp
openssl (not needed but will speedup the authentication if available).
Please note that Redis uses port 6379 by default, so you should either change
the port number in the configuration file (which is set to use port 10000), or
configure Redis to use a matching port.
How to contribute
I plan to hack on Lamer News in my free time as it is interesting to have
a non trivial open source example for Redis that is also an useful application.
However contributions are welcomed. Just make sure to:
Keep it simple. No complex code, no extreme ruby programming. Ideally non ruby people should understand the code without much efforts.
Don't use templates, they suck.
If your code slows down significantly the page generation time it will not get merged.
Do everything you can to avoid depending on new ruby gems.
Open an issue on github before firing your editor to see if there are good chances that your changes will be merged.
If you don't want to follow all this rules, forking the code is encouraged! The license is two clause BSD, do with this code what you want. Run your site, turn it into a blog, hack it to the extreme consequences. Have fun :)
Web sites using this code
http://lamernews.com Programming News.
http://hackingitalia.com Programming and Startup News (In Italian).
http://www.echojs.com JavaScript News.
Data Layout
Users
Every user is represented by the following fields:
A Redis hash named user:<user id> with the following fields:
id -> user ID
username -> The username
password -> Hashed password, PBKDF2(salt|password) note: | means concatenation
ctime -> Registration time (unix time)
karma -> User karma, earned visiting the site and posting good stuff
about -> Some optional info about the user
email -> Optional, used to show gravatars
auth -> authentication token
apisecret -> api POST requests secret code, to prevent CSRF attacks.
flags -> user flags. "a" enables administrative privileges.
karma_incr_time -> last time karma was incremented
pwd_reset -> unix time of the last password reset requested.
replies -> number of unread replies
Additionally for every user there is the following key:
`username.to.id:<lowercase_username>` -> User ID
This is used to lookup users by name.
Frequency of user posting is limited by a key named
user:<user_id>:submitted_recently with TTL 15 minutes. If a user
attempts to post before that key has expired an error message notifies
the user of the amount of time until posting is permitted.
Account creation is rate limited by IP address with a key named
limit:create_user:<ip_address> with TTL 15 hours.
Authentication
Users receive an authentication token after a valid pair of username/password
is received.
This token is in the form of a SHA1-sized hex number.
The representation is a simple Redis key in the form:
`auth:<lowercase_token>` -> User ID
News
News are represented as an hash with key name news:<news id>.
The hash has the following fields:
id -> News id
title -> News title
url -> News url
user_id => The User ID that posted the news
ctime -> News creation time. Unix time.
score -> News score. See source to check how this is computed.
rank -> News score adjusted by age: RANK = SCORE / AGE^ALPHA
up -> Counter with number of upvotes
down -> Counter with number of downvotes
comments -> number of comments
Note: up, down, comments fields are also available in other ways but we
denormalize for speed.
Also recently posted urls have a key named url:<actual full url> with TTL 48
hours and set to the news ID of a recently posted news having this url.
So if another user will try to post a given content again within 48 hours the
system will simply redirect it to the previous news.
News is never deleted, but just marked as deleted adding the "del"
field with value 1 to the news object. However when the post is
rendered into HTML, it is displayed as [deleted news] text.
News votes
Every news has a sorted set with user upvotes and downvotes. The keys are named
respectively news.up:<news id> and news.down:<news id>.
In the sorted sets the score is the unix time of the vote creation, the element
is the user ID of the voting user.
Posting a news will automatically register an up vote from the user posting
the news.
Saved news
The system stores a list of upvoted news for every user using a sorted set named
user.saved:<user id>, index by unix time. The value of the sorted set elements
is the <news id>.
Submitted news
Like saved news every user has an associated sorted set with news he posted.
The key is called user.posted:<user id>. Again the score is the unix time and
the element is the news id.
Top and Latest news
news.cron is used to generate the "Latest News" page.
It is a sorted set where the score is the Unix time the news was posted, and the
value is the news ID.
news.top is used to generate the "Top News" page.
It is a sorted set where the score is the "RANK" of the news, and the value is
the news ID.
Comments
Comments are represented using a very memory efficient pattern.
The system is implemented in the comments.rb file.
In short every thread (that is a collection of comments for a given
news) is represented by an hash. Every hash entry represents a
single comment:
The hash field is the comment
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
24 sourcesAntirez tried, with lamernews: https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb
Diff that vs HN circa 2008: https://github.com/evanrmurphy/SweetScript/blob/master/arc3....
Lamernews seems like just another HN clone, but back when it was launched it was a serious attempt at being a competitor. They probably came closest to pulling away a significant chunk of HN. I started to use it.
Then I ran into missing features. Little quality of life stuff. I forget what they were, but the whole site felt noticeably harder to use. So I stopped using it.
It's so tempting to think "HN is so simple. Just throw Rails at the problem and you can wipe the floor with them." But Lamernews was 2,964 lines of Ruby, and only managed to contain about 60% of the features. news.arc is 2,616 lines. And I don't care what anybody says: if you sat down and forced
Read the rest
yourself to read that code for a week straight, you'd find it is actually quite readable. It's terse because it's for getting shit done.
Ask HN: Script to run a site like HN?
I'm looking to build a site like HN as a hobby project and don't really want to start from scratch. Would anyone be so kind as to help me build a list of codebases that are relevant?
So far I have...
https://github.com/reddit/reddit
https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
https://github.com/jcs/lobsters
1 points · Open discussionit would be great to have people share more on the (open-source) software driving forums and news-sites. For example, I learned quite a lot about Ruby and Redis from looking at the source of Lamernews ( https://github.com/antirez/lamernews ) and I also learned using Promises and Redit with Node while experimenting with ( https://github.com/mulderp/echojs )
In Show HN: Berlin Hacker NewsTake a look at Lamernews (https://github.com/antirez/lamernews). It is written in Ruby by the author Redis. It uses Redis as the primary database.
Here is it in action: http://lamernews.com/
In Question: How do I build a discussion board in the HN Style?There's antirez' "lamernews", a rather straight-forward Ruby/Redis application and its clone "lusernews" in Python.
https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
https://github.com/dengzhp/lusernews
In Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News/Reddit-like open source platform?You might like lamernews[1], made by antirez, which uses redis.
[1]: https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
In Next Big Thing, a HN-like site for music contentThere is a 'source code' link at the bottom that leads to https://github.com/antirez/lamernews, which looks mostly the same with a different stylesheet, so I think they did save that effort ;)
And FWIW, Telescope may preserve the functionality of HN, but I like the design a lot less (though the Echo design could use some work).
In Echo JS - JavaScript NewsUnrelated, but there are good open source clones like https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
In Ask PG: Why is Hacker News not Open Source?"The goal is to have a system that is very simple to understand and modify and that is able to handle a very high load using a small virtual server, ensuring at the same time a very low latency user experience."
https://github.com/antirez/lamernews#readme
In Lamer NewsCheck the source code of lamernews:
https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
You may find some inspiration there ...
In Ask HN: Hacker news clone script in Ruby?Have a look at https://github.com/antirez/lamernews.
Live site: http://lamernews.com/
In Ask HN: self-hosted hacker news clone?in terms of tools that may power some of the clones out there, in looking around i see this one:
https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
which powers a couple of sites. this one's demo site seems down:
https://github.com/jaekwon/YCatalyst
not entirely sure what sites it powers. these may help you find some of the more community-specific clones out there.
In Is there a list of Hacker News clones?You might try lamernews[1], created by Redis author antirez.
> Lamer news is an implementation of a Reddit / Hacker News style news web site written using Ruby, Sinatra, Redis and jQuery.
> The goal is to have a system that is very simple to understand and modify and that is able to handle a very high load using a small virtual server, ensuring at the same time a very low latency user experience.
[1]http://lamernews.com/ and https://github.com/antirez/lamernews
In Ask HN: An open source implementation of Hacker News?You are right, I don't mean "abstract HTML", I just mean to provide a way to generate it from code using the same syntax of your code. This is what I use:
https://github.com/antirez/lamernews/blob/master/app.rb#L138...
For instance to write
<foo>
<bar id="4">content</bar>
</foo>
You write:
H.foo {
H.bar(:id => 4) {"content}
}
So everything you can write in HTML you can write in this DSL, there is no real abstraction, but it is Ruby code like in all the rest of the application.
In Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghettiShowing the 15 most recent of 24 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.